(please click TWICE to enlarge photos)

In the “now” recording, Ron Edge raises his arms in surprised thanks to the highway department. All buildings from this corner of Mercer Street and Boren Avenue have been cleared. In their place Edge stands on a field of stretched plastic, an ironic repeat of the Raber family’s garden. Ron and I agree that the sandbags represent potatoes. To us, the sacks standing behind the quartet of farmers in the “then” photo resemble gunnies stuffed with potatoes.

The historian-collector Edge purchased this farm scene out of admiration for the work of its photographer, the studio of Peterson and Bros. For about a decade after their 1876 arrival in Seattle, Henry and Louis Peterson’s recordings of our city are on the whole the best. This portrait of the Raber farm — now near the Mercer Street exit off Interstate 5 — is rare for its subject and how remote it is from the Peterson studio at the western waterfront foot of Cherry Street. The photographers may well have been friends with the Rabers and even traded this recording for produce. Bartering was then commonplace – and may become so again.

“Joseph Raber farm near Lake Union 1882” is written on the back of the original print. Next to the print’s own caption, the leaning tree on the south shore of Lake Union was very helpful in locating both the place and point of view, which is looking northeast. The tree shows up in several other photographs of the neighborhood (see below). Those clues, joined with property records from the state archives and city directories, made it possible for Jean Sherrard and Ron Edge to return to the garden of sandbags and stand within a few feet of where Raber and the others posed with their crops.

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, Paul? – YES JEAN a few pictures and three illustrated “stories” or features that appeared in former years as “now and thens” in Pacific Northwest mag.   First four images relevant to the Raber farm story above.  (Remember please to Click Twice to Enlarge.)

We may have a mere glimpse of part of the Raber farm house in the panorama of the south end of the Lake Union that looks south sometime in the mid-late-1880s from near Boren and John – a bit northwest of Boren and John probably.  Note that the leaning fir tree – our clue from Ron Edge’s Peterson pix of the Raber farm – appears in the pan.  In the detail below the pan I have outlined in yellow what I think-believe-trust-hope is the Raber home, or the parts of it that show above and around another structure that sits between it and the photographer.  Otherwise other recordings of the Raber farmhouse – or parts of it – have so far escaped us.

Click to Enlarge this one – surely.   Another pan looking north to Lake Union from a prospect near Fairview and Thomas.   The leaning lone fir is again helpfully apparent against the lake.  The mill’s position is obvious, left of center, and Queen Anne Hill is on the distant left.  This also dates from the mid-late 1880s.   The Raber farmhouse, if it survived, is hidden behind the frame house that holds the mid-ground, right-of-center.

This look east across the southern end of Lake Union is a puzzle, although surely one that can be unraveled with time.   This is a very early view of the Western Mill – it is still quite primitive – and yet there is no Raber farm to be found here.  It seems most likely that the farm and the lone fir are just out of frame to the left, although this still troubles me.   I expected the farmhouse to be apparent on the left side of this view by the pioneer photographer Peiser.  The date is mid-1880s. The next panorama from Queen Anne Hill – like this one – has considerable text following it, and is one of three features that now follow, which were originally in the only surviving big pulp in town – the Times.

THE BIG FUNNEL

In the interests of promoting the south end of Lake Union as the strategic route for boomtown Seattle’s rapid spread north, an early 20th-Century real estate company called it “The Big Funnel.” In 1906 Westlake Avenue was cut through the city grid thereby linking the business district directly with the lake. Here the way for the funnel is still being prepared by the Western Mill built, in part, over the lake and seen at the center of Arthur Churchill Warner’s ca. 1892 photograph.

When Western Mill was first built in 1882 it was surrounded by tall stands of virgin Douglas fir and cedar. The mill worked around the clock to turn it all into timber and here only a decade later the neighborhood is practically void of trees. A few stragglers survive on the Capitol Hill horizon. Most likely many of the homes that dapple this landscape were conveniently built of lumber cut from the trees that once stood here.

The street in the foreground is Dexter. Beyond it is the trolley trestle bound for Fremont that was built over the lake north from the mill in 1890. Its name, Rollins, was changed to Westlake not long after Warner photographed it. This side of Westlake — the Lake’s extreme southwest corner — was a popular summer swimming hole until it was turned into one of the city’s many dumps and filled in with garbage and construction waste in the late teens. Once landlocked, Westlake was soon widened and paved.

Beyond the Westlake trestle is a millpond littered with logs. There more recently a distinguished line of vessels has been moored. These include ships stationed here after the Naval Armory was completed in 1941.  There the ferry San Mateo rested here until she was towed to Canada.  (When this text was first composed in 1997 the San Mateo’s younger sister ferry the Kalakala was expected to find refuge in this harbor.  She was moored instead on the north shore of the lake.

Now the last of our “Mosquito Fleet” steamers, the restored Virginia V, bobs in these waters as one of the main attractions of the new Marine Center that is rejuvenating the old armory that will soon become the new home for the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI). Locals with a taste for irony may recall that another Puget Sound steamer, the City of Everett, gave her last days here as the converted Surfside 9 Restaurant. She sank in the 60s after City Light turned off her bilge pumps for failure to pay the electric bill.

THE COAL ROAD – 1872 to 1878

This raw little photograph (above) is probably what it is often described as being: a record of the day when the Seattle Coal and Transportation Company gave locals free rides on its new railway between Lake Union and the ridge above Elliott Bay – where the Pike Place Market now holds.  Immediately left of center stands a woman in a cape and flamboyantly banded dress.  She may be holding an inaugural flag in her left hand – the bright triangular form.  Another flag stands to the right of center and against the sky.

The familiar stack of the little locomotive Ant rises above a somewhat scattered crowd in which every head appears to be posing for the photographer, whose camera looks north in approximate line with present-day Westlake Avenue toward Lake Union.   (The scene may actually be closer to mid-block between Westlake and Terry.) The distant ridge still dark with old-growth forest is the future Wallingford.

The Ant arrived from San Francisco on Nov. 21, 1871.  It took 16 horses to drag it from the waterfront up to Pike Street, where it was set to work building a narrow-gauge track along Pike and down the future Westlake (or near it) to the lake.  There, eight locally made coal cars were routinely transferred form barges and hooked to the Ant.

On March 22, 1872, every citizen was given a free ride; benches were installed for the occasion in the system’s first eight gondolas.  Accompanied by a brass band – for at least the first trip – the train ran back and forth from sunrise to sunset.

The entire route was 17-plus miles long.  It started in the coalmines on the east side of Lake Washington – those around Coal Creek and Newcastle – on another narrow gauge railroad.  The cars were transferred to barges on Lake Washington and then towed by a small steamer to the Montlake portage.  There they were pulled along another railroad track by cattle driven by members of the Brownsfield family that first settled the University District.  The cars were next transferred to barges again for another steam through the length of Portage Bay and Lake Union to transfer at the place shown here for another haul by rail to the over-sized Pike Street Wharf and coal bunkers.  It was an expensive and complex haul in all, but still it paid well, making coal Seattle’s biggest export during the late 1870s.

The last coals from Newcastle traveled this route on Jan. 29, 1878.  By then the Ant had been transferred to the new Seattle and Walla Walla line, which ran directly around the south end of Lake Washington from the company’s new coal wharf off King Street to its Eastside coal fields.   In the detail from the 1878 birdseye of Seattle, there is no Lake Union to be seen.  The coal railroad however is there chugging out of the forest, far right, and heading to the Pike Street Coal Wharf, far left.  Lake Washington is in the distance with a lone steamer heading for a stage connection with Seattle by way of a wagon road on or near Madison.

THE TWO HOMES OF VIRTUOSO CLARINETIST NICHOLAS OECONOMACOS

The splendidly eccentric square-jawed figure of Nicholas Oeconomacos holding his cane, kid gloves and wide-rimmed fedora posed for Arthur “Link” Lingenbrink sometime in the 1920s.  Oeconomacos in his black cape stands above the spring tulips in his front yard at the southeast corner of John St. and Boren Ave.  Link had his own specialties, including storytelling, celebrity chasing and sign painting.

To those who merely saw him with his oversize flat black hat shading his big head, a studded cane, a black cape and the practice of carrying his caged canary on walks downtown, the Greek clarinetist was a valued eccentric. Those who also heard him enjoyed what Homer Hadley, who conducted the Seattle Symphony when Oeconomacos first joined it as principal clarinetist about 1910, described as “the softest clarinet in the world.” John Philip Sousa claimed to Seattle art patron Henry Broderick that Oeconomacos was the best clarinet player ever to appear in his band. Oeconomacos made two world tours with Sousa before settling in Seattle.

Despite his celebrity, Oeconomacos played in the streets during the Great Depression, collecting change in a failed attempt to pay his mortgage. Kicked out of his home on Boren at John (behind the photographer Lingenbrink who took the two views above) he somehow managed to stay in the Cascade neighborhood, moving to 625 Minor Ave. and Roy.  (This home on Minor was about 500 feet due east of the Raber farm – where it had been in the 1880.  The clarinetist’s second home sat in what would be part of the westbound lanes of the Mercer Street exit from Interstate-5.)

(Note the tower atop the Ford Assembly plant, which is still in place but for other uses – perhaps storage units.  It was for much of its life home for Craftsman Press.)   Oeconomacos called his new home the House of the Terrestrial Globe.  (Hence the simple circle ornament top center and another one on the west façade – see below.) The little sidewalk sign at the bottom right-hand corner that reads “Enjoy Living Music” is surely Arthur Lingenbrink’s.  I became very familiar with Link in the early 1980s when he was in his early 90s.  With his brother Paul he was a professional sign painter and a very good storyteller – including stories about his friend Oeconomacos.  I recognize his style.

On the far west side of his home, the virtuoso appointed his Garden of Memories with fluted columns and other classical ornaments that reminded him and his audience that he first practiced in the shadow of the Parthenon.  He managed to scrounge the pieces for his sets and applications from thrift and junk stores and the back lots of second-hand building suppliers. It was there, seated in his Greek garden, that Oeconomacos played his last solo concerts of “living music” as the sign reads. The clarinetist was not fond of radio.

After the high bridge over Fremont was dedicated in 1932, Aurora Avenue became the centerline for a wide and long swath of car culture with auto dealers, parts stores, drive-ins for burgers, drive-ins for movies, and more than one race track.  By the figuring of both collector Ron Edge, who lent us this subject, and the by now legendary racer Mel Anthony, this is the first day of racing at the Seattle Speed Bowl.  It opened in 1936 and that’s the date penned on the print.

Anthony, posing in the “now” at the uncannily fit age of 87, first raced here as an adolescent on his big tire bicycle.  He snuck onto the track – the gate was open – and boldly pumped passed a slow-moving grader only to be swallowed and upset in one of the tracks steep turns by sticky bunker oil applied moments earlier.  The operators of both the grader & the oiler enjoyed his fall and laughed.

Through the years Anthony’s wit has made him many friends, and gained him a unique “Sportsman Trophy” in 1950, while his dare-do both won races and put him in hospitals.  Mel always healed and, for our considerable delight, proved to be a very good narrator.  His book “Smoke Sand and Rubber” is packed with stories about racing and pictures too.  The book can be sampled and/or ordered here.

Before this track closed with the Second World War, Anthony competed on its oval in a 1939 Seattle Star Jalopy Race.  He explains “I was 16 and in the lead and then everything fell off.”

After returning from the war in 1946, Anthony raced the regional circuit until 1955.  I remember reading about his midget class exploits while I, an adolescent, was delivering Spokane’s morning paper, the Spokesman Review in the early 50s.  Anthony notes “In Spokane they gave us a lot of INK.”

Recently “Methanol Mel” returned to the track, and so far has remarkably won every midget race he has entered.  Jean Sherrard, who posed Mel in the “now,” describes him as a “wonder of nature and great testimony for genes, very good ones.”  Mel explains,  “Ten or fifteen laps for me now and my tongue is hanging out.  No fool like an old fool.  I have to be very careful.”

WEB EXTRAS

Paul, there are some remarkable additions to this week’s Now & Then.  Ron Edge has sent us some chunky PDFs of materials he scanned from the early days of midget racing in the northwest.  I’m posting only one of several items here today: The Midget Auto Racing Annual from 1946, the cover of which appears below.

More of Ron’s amazing scans to come, when I figure out how to override the 2 mb limit on our blog server.

UPDATE

The 2 meg limit has been cracked.  Please see below for Ron’s classic PDFs of midget racing history.  (Cautionary note: a couple are pretty large files, and may take time to download if you have a slow server.)

Anything to add, Paul?

Just a wee thing Jean – a now-&-then of a few years past.  You may remember that the above story was begun with a mention of how the George Washington Bridge – AKA Aurora  Bridge – opened up Aurora to its car and speed culture.  Here follows the story from opening day, a picture of the same, and another photo of the bridge from its south end taken early in its life.

GEORGE WASHINGTON MEMORIAL BRIDGE 1932 DEDICATION

One of the great spectacles to have ever been staged here occurred on the six-lanes of the George Washington Memorial Bridge for its dedication on the sunlit winter afternoon of February 22, 1932.  On that day, the 200 anniversary of the “father of the nation’s” birthday, no one called it the Aurora Bridge.  The bridge dedication is still remembered by many locals (I’ve talked with at least five of them.)   What is still vividly recalled is what shows here: a throng of 20,000 crowding the pavement of what one of the scheduled speakers described as “another link in the Pacific Coast Highway, the concrete chain between Canada and Mexico.”

A dedication program that included a few surprises preceded this ecstatic finale.  There were, of course, appropriate times for when bands played, choruses sang, cannons boomed, speakers spoke, and as if on cue the crowd roared.  That the day’s final speaker was the state’s Governor Roland H. Hartley was doubly ironic.  First, Hartley had never been an advocate of the bridge and had once even described paved highways generally as “hard surfaced joy rides.”

The second Hartley irony played like retribution.  The long-winded governor was interrupted mid-sentence by the President of the United State Herbert Hoover.   Since Hartley was then heralding George Washington’s “avoidance of foreign entanglements” he was better interrupted considering that the new George Washington Memorial Bridge was designed in part to promote a better “entanglement” of Canada, Mexico and the U.S.A.   It was, however, not any political nicety that motivated Hoover but rather strict observances of the ceremony schedule that had the president dedicating the bridge at 2:57 P.M. and it was exactly at 2: 57 that he pressed the golden telegraph key from his White House office.

Almost instantly the field artillery on Queen Anne Hill roared, a dozen trumpets blasted their fanfare, the fireboat Alki in the canal directly below the bridge shot water high into the arch made by the bridge, an oversized American flag, upper right, unfurled above the speaker’s platform at the south end of the bridge, and the state governor regrouped to shout into his microphone “The President has just pressed the key!”

What followed was the rush of thousands from both ends of the bridge to its center.  The next day’s Seattle Times reported that “youngsters galloping ahead, were the first to meet across the great span, and a few minutes later the bridge was a black mass of citizens . . . The bridge was dedicated.”

I used this contribution from the Muni Archive for a now-then feature in the Times back in 1998.  (Well it would not be forward in 1998, I know, but the more needless words one uses the more time there is to think and even relax in between the meaningful ones.)   The date is hand written below the clipping that follows.   Remember please, don’t stop with one click, CLICK TWICE ENLARGE.  This is in response to Ben Lukoff’s question about the possible existence of other Van de Kamp’s windmills.  He also found one in the Roosevelt district and includes a link to it.  It too no longer turns in the wind.  I remember small Van de Camp’s sections in some supermarkets but no more big windmills when I arrived here in the mid-1960s.  Read on for some description of what happened to this windmill near the north end of the University Bridge.

A few weeks ago we featured the Green Lake Theater, photographed by Lennard LaVanway in 1947. Here is LaVanway’s Ridgemont Theater, and also from ’47.

I suspect that many readers will remember the Ridgemont as Seattle’s primary “art house” in the 1960s and ’70s. Jim Selvidge, the manager through most of those experimental years, “modestly” describes his theater “as the trigger that led to Seattle’s current reputation in Hollywood for the hippest audiences, the place to go if you want to test a film.”

Many of my best early film experiences in big, dark rooms were had from its seats or from Selvidge’s other repertoire venue, the Edgemont in Edmonds. I thank him. Since most of these were foreign films with subtitles, the Ridgemont was considered by some a “communist front” and the lights of its marquee were at risk — pelted often with rocks, eggs and even excrement.

Likely, though, the dangers were small when the Phinney Ridge theater was showing films like those showing here: “Easy to Wed,” a romantic comedy with Van Johnson, Esther Williams and Lucille Ball, and “Terror by Night,” a Sherlock Holmes thriller in which Basil Rathbone has to solve a Rhodesian diamond theft and find a murderer among the passengers of a train running from London to Edinburgh. Easy to do for Sherlock.

Rapping it now, thanks to local film historian David Jeffers for this tight summary of the Ridgemont’s long life. “It was a big-box neighborhood theater with 452 seats. Opened as Houghton’s 78th Theatre in 1919, Ridgemont in 1922, Bruen’s Ridgemont in 1928, remodeled twice, in 1938 and 1967.” After 70 often adventurous years, it closed in 1989.

Anything to add, Paul?

Yes and Welcome back from your European adventures, with your students from Hillside and then also with Berangere (of this blog).  The Blog has missed you and your mastering.  Now I’ll add a few more photographs, and with little comment.

Next up the block to 77th, the northeast corner with Greenwood Ave., and two more by LaVanway.  It is a clapboard that has been now for many years familiar to us as the home of Moon Photo.  (And yes they still do a color run for slide film.)

I know nothing about the provenance of this photograph, except that it showed up on my front porch among a small bundle of negatives.  Still with the help of a tax card, a few city directories, and a scattering of other sources we can make some notes.

With his or her back to Sacred Heart Catholic Church, an unknown photographer looked northeast through the intersection of Second Avenue North and Thomas Street.  The Eaton Apartment House across the way was built in 1909 – in time perhaps for the city’s first world’s fair. (It is at least an irony that is was torn down for the second.)  It held 19 of everything: tubs, sinks, basins, through its 52 plastered rooms.  In the 1938 tax assessment it is described as in “fair condition” with a “future life” of about 13 years.  In fact, it held the corner for a full half century until it and much else in the neighborhood was cleared for construction of  Century 21.

The Eaton and its nearby neighbor, the Warren Avenue School, were two of the larger structures razed for Century 21.  However, the neighborhood’s biggest – the Civic Auditorium, Ice Arena, and the 146^th Field Artillery Armory – were given makeovers and saved for the fair.  Built in 1939, the old Armory shows on the far right.  (Another view of it is included below.)  Although not so easy to find it is also in the “now” having served in its 71 years first as the Armory, then the ’62 fair’s Food Circus, and long since the Center House.

This is part of David and Louisa Denny’s pioneer land claim, which Salish history explains served for centuries as a favorite place to snag low-flying ducks and hold potlatches.  The oldest user of the Eaton Apt. site was even more ancient.  The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) brought King Tut, or at least parts of his tomb, to the Flag Pavilion in 1978.  It was about then that Andy Warhol also showed up to party with SAM in the old pavilion, which in 2002 was replaced and greatly improved with the Fisher Pavilion.

Readers who have old photographs of this neighborhood from before the 1962 fair (they are rare) or of the fair itself might like to share them with historylink.  That non-profit encyclopedia of regional history is preparing a book on the fair, one that will resemble, we expect, its impressive publication on the recent Alaska Yukon Pacific Centennial.  As with the AYP book, the now hard-at-work authors are Paula Becker and Alan Stein.  You can reach them by phone at 206-447-8140 or on line at Admin@historylink.org.

This addition to the most recent Seattle Now and Then is sent by frequent commentator and sometimes contributor, Matt Fleagle.  Thanks Matt.  Your sometimes shunning of optics during your walks of exploration is a kind of soft-focus Zen I think.  Two points about your caption.  I agree that your photograph does make an elegant composition, and the box cars – or flat cars with freight – carry it too.  And the pigeons two.  You mention the look down from the bluff at the building of Pier 66.  I did a story on this maybe 20 years ago, and for the “now” I remember being a few yards north of the Lenora Street overpass and also turned a bit more to the west.  They were preparing to tear down Pier 66 at the time.  Perhaps it was more like 15 years ago, but I’m not looking it up for now.  (left)

Here follows Matt’s snap and his explanation.

Of all the trestles constructed to cross Alaskan Way the longest-lived is the overpass that reaches Colman Dock, the ferry terminal, on Marion Street.  The second oldest is this one on Bell Street. The bridge on Marion was always only for pedestrians.  The bridge on Bell was for many years used also by trucks, cars, and in the beginning wagons as well.

Actually, there have been many other overpasses on our waterfront.  Those at King and Madison were both used for moving coal to ships.  The trestle on Pike was used first for coal and later rebuilt for pedestrians. Bridges at Virginia, Clay and Lenora streets complete the list, but all these are now long gone.

The Bell Street overpass was completed in 1915 soon after the young Port of Seattle’s big Bell Street Terminal opened. The Port was proud of its grand new pier and the bridge helped to safely show it off.  Here was an easy way for produce sellers to move between the Pike Place Market and the Port’s dock with the cold storage it offered.  And the bridge – its sidewalk – encouraged families shopping nearby at the Pike market to also visit the recreation park the Port built on the roof of the Bell Street pier.

There is one concluding note to pull from the “top” of this subject: the Broadway – Empire Laundry.   The name is signed large on the west façade of the four-story red brick power laundry at Bell and Western.  It opened in 1914, a year before the Port got settled one block and one bridge away.  As with other power laundries it was women who did most of the hard work and at measly wages.  Consequently, the women in local laundries went on strike – first in 1917.  Eighteen years later, the organized women of this laundry won the strike of 1935 and the union they formed was for two decades Seattle’s largest organized coalition of women workers.  See www.66bellstreet.com for the full story.

[Please Remember to Click the images below to ENLARGE them.)